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For Owner Also-Rans, There Is No Next Year
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During the competition, reports flew that Malek's group had done too much lobbying, that the Lerner group wasn't diverse enough, and that Smulyan was an out-of-towner.
Malek and Zients have both said owning the team was an opportunity to do a civic good. "We're not just some guys who want to own a baseball team because it's a nice thing to do in life," Malek said. "We feel it's a civic undertaking."
Malek, who lives in McLean, was recruited with the blessing of the mayor in 1999 to lead an effort to bring back major league baseball. Struck by the absence of a team and the decline of a sport he loved, he agreed.
Four years ago, he was approached by Zients, who had just stepped back from two successful research companies he had been running. A native of Kensington and ardent baseball fan, he was interested and had money to invest.
He and Malek pledged equal, unspecified amounts toward the team and were joined by other high-profile investors, including Powell, Raines, Jordan and former Redskins great Darrell Green.
Malek is known for his work ethic and is also a fitness nut who still likes to challenge colleagues to pull-up competitions. A former Green Beret who served in Vietnam, he keeps in his office a portrait of Gen. Sylvanus Thayer, the 19th-century father of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the man for whom Malek's company is named.
Malek is also director and former president of Northwest Airlines. He is chairman and chief executive of Thayer Hotel Investors, which owns and operates $2 billion worth of hotels across the country. He was president of Marriott Hotels for most of the 1980s and is a former owner, along with President Bush, of the Texas Rangers.
He is a respected figure in Republican circles and is close to the Bush family.
He declined to speak at length yesterday, saying his baseball crusade "was highly rewarding" and a "wonderful thing to have done."
"Would we have liked to have been the owners?" he said. "You bet." But baseball is back in Washington. He asked, "How can you complain, when your primary goal was accomplished?"
